OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Generate-Then-Validate: A Novel Question Generation Approach Using Small Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

We explore the use of small language models (SLMs) for automatic question generation as a complement to the prevalent use of their large counterparts in learning analytics research. We present a novel question generation pipeline that leverages both the text generation and the probabilistic reasoning abilities of SLMs to generate high-quality questions. Adopting a "generate-then-validate" strategy, our pipeline first performs expansive generation to create an abundance of candidate questions and refine them through selective validation based on novel probabilistic reasoning. We conducted two evaluation studies, one with seven human experts and the other with a large language model (LLM), to assess the quality of the generated questions. Most judges (humans or LLMs) agreed that the generated questions had clear answers and generally aligned well with the intended learning objectives. Our findings suggest that an SLM can effectively generate high-quality questions when guided by a well-designed pipeline that leverages its strengths.
Confucius Code Agent: Scalable Agent Scaffolding for Real-World Codebases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Real-world software engineering tasks require coding agents that can operate on massive repositories, sustain long-horizon sessions, and reliably coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing research-grade coding agents offer transparency but struggle when scaled to heavier, production-level workloads, while production-grade systems achieve strong practical performance but provide limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We introduce the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), a software engineering agent that can operate at large-scale codebases. CCA is built on top of the Confucius SDK, an agent development platform structured around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK supports a unified orchestrator with advanced context management for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension system for reliable tool use. In addition, we introduce a meta-agent that automates the construction, evaluation, and refinement of agents through a build-test-improve cycle, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks and tool stacks. Instantiated on the Confucius SDK using the meta-agent, CCA demonstrates strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a Resolve@1 of 59%, exceeding prior research baselines as well as commercial results, under identical repositories, model backends, and tool access.
Inverse problems with diffusion models: MAP estimation via mode-seeking loss
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

A pre-trained unconditional diffusion model, combined with posterior sampling or maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation techniques, can solve arbitrary inverse problems without task-specific training or fine-tuning. However, existing posterior sampling and MAP estimation methods often rely on modeling approximations and can also be computationally demanding. In this work, we propose a new MAP estimation strategy for solving inverse problems with a pre-trained unconditional diffusion model. Specifically, we introduce the variational mode-seeking loss (VML) and show that its minimization at each reverse diffusion step guides the generated sample towards the MAP estimate (modes in practice). VML arises from a novel perspective of minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the diffusion posterior $p(\mathbf{x}_0|\mathbf{x}_t)$ and the measurement posterior $p(\mathbf{x}_0|\mathbf{y})$, where $\mathbf{y}$ denotes the measurement. Importantly, for linear inverse problems, VML can be analytically derived without any modeling approximations. Based on further theoretical insights, we propose VML-MAP, an empirically effective algorithm for solving inverse problems via VML minimization, and validate its efficacy in both performance and computational time through extensive experiments on diverse image-restoration tasks across multiple datasets.
Generalized Spherical Neural Operators: Green's Function Formulation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Neural operators offer powerful approaches for solving parametric partial differential equations, but extending them to spherical domains remains challenging due to the need to preserve intrinsic geometry while avoiding distortions that break rotational consistency. Existing spherical operators rely on rotational equivariance but often lack the flexibility for real-world complexity. We propose a generalized operator-design framework based on the designable spherical Green's function and its harmonic expansion, establishing a solid operator-theoretic foundation for spherical learning. Based on this, we propose an absolute and relative position-dependent Green's function that enables flexible balance of equivariance and invariance for real-world modeling. The resulting operator, Green's-function Spherical Neural Operator (GSNO) with a novel spectral learning method, can adapt to non-equivariant systems while retaining spectral efficiency and grid invariance. To exploit GSNO, we develop SHNet, a hierarchical architecture that combines multi-scale spectral modeling with spherical up-down sampling, enhancing global feature representation. Evaluations on diffusion MRI, shallow water dynamics, and global weather forecasting, GSNO and SHNet consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods. The theoretical and experimental results position GSNO as a principled and generalized framework for spherical operator design and learning, bridging rigorous theory with real-world complexity.
WebSTAR: Scalable Data Synthesis for Computer Use Agents with Step-Level Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Computer use agents (CUAs) can operate real-world digital interfaces but remain difficult to train due to the high cost of graphical user interface (GUI) interaction and the scarcity of high-quality trajectory data. Existing datasets rely on human demonstrations, limiting scalability. A natural alternative is to synthesize data from strong CUAs, yet their rollouts are highly noisy, with incorrect or suboptimal actions consisting a large proportion of the steps, making naive imitation ineffective. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a scalable data synthesis pipeline that transforms noisy rollouts into reliable supervision without human annotation. The core idea is step-level filtering, which evaluates actions individually to retain only correct steps, complemented by reasoning augmentation for improved planning. Using this pipeline, we construct WebSTAR, a dataset of 13.3K trajectories and 267K graded, reasoning-rich steps synthesized from OpenAI's computer-use-preview model. We train Qwen-2.5-VL-Instruct models (7B and 32B) on WebSTAR. On WebVoyager, our 7B model surpasses SoTA open-source CUA model UI-TARS-1.5-7B by more than 15% with only supervised finetuning. Building on step-level grading, we further create WebSCORE, a dataset of graded step-level actions, and train StepRM, a 7B multimodal process reward model distilled from o4-mini, which matches its grading quality while being far more efficient to deploy at scale. Our results establish step-level filtering as a key principle for scalable CUA training and construct two new datasets (WebSTAR, WebSCORE) and a lightweight process reward model (StepRM) as practical tools to advance robust and efficient CUAs.
Explanation Bias is a Product: Revealing the Hidden Lexical and Position Preferences in Post-Hoc Feature Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Good quality explanations strengthen the understanding of language models and data. Feature attribution methods, such as Integrated Gradient, are a type of post-hoc explainer that can provide token-level insights. However, explanations on the same input may vary greatly due to underlying biases of different methods. Users may be aware of this issue and mistrust their utility, while unaware users may trust them inadequately. In this work, we delve beyond the superficial inconsistencies between attribution methods, structuring their biases through a model- and method-agnostic framework of three evaluation metrics. We systematically assess both lexical and position bias (what and where in the input) for two transformers; first, in a controlled, pseudo-random classification task on artificial data; then, in a semi-controlled causal relation detection task on natural data. We find a trade-off between lexical and position biases in our model comparison, with models that score high on one type score low on the other. We also find signs that anomalous explanations are more likely to be biased.
Mitigation of multi-path propagation artefacts in acoustic targets with adaptive cepstral filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Passive acoustic sensing is a cost-effective solution for monitoring moving targets such as vessels and aircraft, but its performance is hindered by complex propagation effects like multi-path reflections and motion-induced artefacts. Existing filtering techniques do not properly incorporate the characteristics of the environment or account for variability in medium properties, limiting their effectiveness in separating source and reflection components. This paper proposes a method for separating target signals from their reflections in a spectrogram. Temporal filtering is applied to cepstral coefficients using an adaptive band-stop filter, which dynamically adjusts its bandwidth based on the relative intensity of the quefrency components. The method improved the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and log-spectral distance (LSD) across velocities ranging from 10 to 100 metres per second in aircraft noise with simulated motion. It also enhanced the performance of ship-type classification in underwater tasks by 2.28 and 2.62 Matthews Correlation Coefficient percentage points for the DeepShip and VTUAD v2 datasets, respectively. These results demonstrate the potential of the proposed pipeline to improve acoustic target classification and time-delay estimation in multi-path environments, with future work aimed at amplitude preservation and multi-sensor applications.
Beyond Memorization: Selective Learning for Copyright-Safe Diffusion Model Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Memorization in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models poses significant security and intellectual property risks, enabling adversarial attribute extraction and the unauthorized reproduction of sensitive or proprietary features. While conventional dememorization techniques, such as regularization and data filtering, limit overfitting to specific training examples, they fail to systematically prevent the internalization of prohibited concept-level features. Simply discarding all images containing a sensitive feature wastes invaluable training data, necessitating a method for selective learning at the concept level. We introduce a gradient projection method designed to enforce a stringent requirement of concept-level feature exclusion. Our defense operates during backpropagation by systematically identifying and excising training signals aligned with embeddings of prohibited attributes. Specifically, we project each gradient update onto the orthogonal complement of the sensitive feature's embedding space, thereby zeroing out its influence on the model's weights. Our method integrates seamlessly into standard diffusion model training pipelines and complements existing defenses. We analyze our method against an adversary aiming for feature extraction. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework drastically reduces memorization while rigorously preserving generation quality and semantic fidelity. By reframing memorization control as selective learning, our approach establishes a new paradigm for IP-safe and privacy-preserving generative AI.
A Multi-Mode Structured Light 3D Imaging System with Multi-Source Information Fusion for Underwater Pipeline Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Underwater pipelines are highly susceptible to corrosion, which not only shorten their service life but also pose significant safety risks. Compared with manual inspection, the intelligent real-time imaging system for underwater pipeline detection has become a more reliable and practical solution. Among various underwater imaging techniques, structured light 3D imaging can restore the sufficient spatial detail for precise defect characterization. Therefore, this paper develops a multi-mode underwater structured light 3D imaging system for pipeline detection (UW-SLD system) based on multi-source information fusion. First, a rapid distortion correction (FDC) method is employed for efficient underwater image rectification. To overcome the challenges of extrinsic calibration among underwater sensors, a factor graph-based parameter optimization method is proposed to estimate the transformation matrix between the structured light and acoustic sensors. Furthermore, a multi-mode 3D imaging strategy is introduced to adapt to the geometric variability of underwater pipelines. Given the presence of numerous disturbances in underwater environments, a multi-source information fusion strategy and an adaptive extended Kalman filter (AEKF) are designed to ensure stable pose estimation and high-accuracy measurements. In particular, an edge detection-based ICP (ED-ICP) algorithm is proposed. This algorithm integrates pipeline edge detection network with enhanced point cloud registration to achieve robust and high-fidelity reconstruction of defect structures even under variable motion conditions. Extensive experiments are conducted under different operation modes, velocities, and depths. The results demonstrate that the developed system achieves superior accuracy, adaptability and robustness, providing a solid foundation for autonomous underwater pipeline detection.
Minimal Clips, Maximum Salience: Long Video Summarization via Key Moment Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are able to process increasingly longer videos. Yet, important visual information is easily lost throughout the entire context and missed by VLMs. Also, it is important to design tools that enable cost-effective analysis of lengthy video content. In this paper, we propose a clip selection method that targets key video moments to be included in a multimodal summary. We divide the video into short clips and generate compact visual descriptions of each using a lightweight video captioning model. These are then passed to a large language model (LLM), which selects the K clips containing the most relevant visual information for a multimodal summary. We evaluate our approach on reference clips for the task, automatically derived from full human-annotated screenplays and summaries in the MovieSum dataset. We further show that these reference clips (less than 6% of the movie) are sufficient to build a complete multimodal summary of the movies in MovieSum. Using our clip selection method, we achieve a summarization performance close to that of these reference clips while capturing substantially more relevant video information than random clip selection. Importantly, we maintain low computational cost by relying on a lightweight captioning model.
Brain-Semantoks: Learning Semantic Tokens of Brain Dynamics with a Self-Distilled Foundation Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The development of foundation models for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series holds significant promise for predicting phenotypes related to disease and cognition. Current models, however, are often trained using a mask-and-reconstruct objective on small brain regions. This focus on low-level information leads to representations that are sensitive to noise and temporal fluctuations, necessitating extensive fine-tuning for downstream tasks. We introduce Brain-Semantoks, a self-supervised framework designed specifically to learn abstract representations of brain dynamics. Its architecture is built on two core innovations: a semantic tokenizer that aggregates noisy regional signals into robust tokens representing functional networks, and a self-distillation objective that enforces representational stability across time. We show that this objective is stabilized through a novel training curriculum, ensuring the model robustly learns meaningful features from low signal-to-noise time series. We demonstrate that learned representations enable strong performance on a variety of downstream tasks even when only using a linear probe. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive scaling analyses indicating more unlabeled data reliably results in out-of-distribution performance gains without domain adaptation.
Toward Scalable VR-Cloud Gaming: An Attention-aware Adaptive Resource Allocation Framework for 6G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

Virtual Reality Cloud Gaming (VR-CG) represents a demanding class of immersive applications, requiring high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and intelligent resource management to ensure optimal user experience. In this paper, we propose a scalable and QoE-aware multi-stage optimization framework for resource allocation in VR-CG over 6G networks. Our solution decomposes the joint resource allocation problem into three interdependent stages: (i) user association and communication resource allocation; (ii) VR-CG game engine placement with adaptive multipath routing; and (iii) attention-aware scheduling and wireless resource allocation based on motion-to-photon latency. For each stage, we design specialized heuristic algorithms that achieve near-optimal performance while significantly reducing computational time. We introduce a novel user-centric QoE model based on visual attention to virtual objects, guiding adaptive resolution and frame rate selection. A dataset-driven evaluation demonstrates that, when compared against state-of-the-art approaches, our framework improves QoE by up to 50\%, reduces communication resource usage by 75\%, and achieves up to 35\% cost savings, while maintaining an average optimality gap of 5\%. Our proposed heuristics solve large-scale scenarios in under 0.1 seconds, highlighting their potential for real-time deployment in next-generation mobile networks.
ProbeMDE: Uncertainty-Guided Active Proprioception for Monocular Depth Estimation in Surgical Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) provides a useful tool for robotic perception, but its predictions are often uncertain and inaccurate in challenging environments such as surgical scenes where textureless surfaces, specular reflections, and occlusions are common. To address this, we propose ProbeMDE, a cost-aware active sensing framework that combines RGB images with sparse proprioceptive measurements for MDE. Our approach utilizes an ensemble of MDE models to predict dense depth maps conditioned on both RGB images and on a sparse set of known depth measurements obtained via proprioception, where the robot has touched the environment in a known configuration. We quantify predictive uncertainty via the ensemble's variance and measure the gradient of the uncertainty with respect to candidate measurement locations. To prevent mode collapse while selecting maximally informative locations to propriocept (touch), we leverage Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) over this gradient map. We validate our method in both simulated and physical experiments on central airway obstruction surgical phantoms. Our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods across standard depth estimation metrics, achieving higher accuracy while minimizing the number of required proprioceptive measurements. Project page: https://brittonjordan.github.io/probe_mde/
Video Deepfake Abuse: How Company Choices Predictably Shape Misuse Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

In 2022, AI image generators crossed a key threshold, enabling much more efficient and dynamic production of photorealistic deepfake images than before. This enabled opportunities for creative and positive uses of these models. However, it also enabled unprecedented opportunities for the low-effort creation of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (AIG-NCII), including AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM). Empirically, these harms were principally enabled by a small number of models that were trained on web data with pornographic content, released with open weights, and insufficiently safeguarded. In this paper, we observe ways in which the same patterns are emerging with video generation models in 2025. Specifically, we analyze how a small number of open-weight AI video generation models have become the dominant tools for videorealistic AIG-NCII video generation. We then analyze the literature on model safeguards and conclude that (1) developers who openly release the weights of capable video generation models without appropriate data curation and/or post-training safeguards foreseeably contribute to mitigatable downstream harm, and (2) model distribution platforms that do not proactively moderate individual misuse or models designed for AIG-NCII foreseeably amplify this harm. While there are no perfect defenses against AIG-NCII and AIG-CSAM from open-weight AI models, we argue that risk management by model developers and distributors, informed by emerging safeguard techniques, will substantially affect the future ease of creating AIG-NCII and AIG-CSAM with generative AI video tools.
Safe Learning for Contact-Rich Robot Tasks: A Survey from Classical Learning-Based Methods to Safe Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Contact-rich tasks pose significant challenges for robotic systems due to inherent uncertainty, complex dynamics, and the high risk of damage during interaction. Recent advances in learning-based control have shown great potential in enabling robots to acquire and generalize complex manipulation skills in such environments, but ensuring safety, both during exploration and execution, remains a critical bottleneck for reliable real-world deployment. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of safe learning-based methods for robot contact-rich tasks. We categorize existing approaches into two main domains: safe exploration and safe execution. We review key techniques, including constrained reinforcement learning, risk-sensitive optimization, uncertainty-aware modeling, control barrier functions, and model predictive safety shields, and highlight how these methods incorporate prior knowledge, task structure, and online adaptation to balance safety and efficiency. A particular emphasis of this survey is on how these safe learning principles extend to and interact with emerging robotic foundation models, especially vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs), which unify perception, language, and control for contact-rich manipulation. We discuss both the new safety opportunities enabled by VLM/VLA-based methods, such as language-level specification of constraints and multimodal grounding of safety signals, and the amplified risks and evaluation challenges they introduce. Finally, we outline current limitations and promising future directions toward deploying reliable, safety-aligned, and foundation-model-enabled robots in complex contact-rich environments. More details and materials are available at our \href{ https://github.com/jack-sherman01/Awesome-Learning4Safe-Contact-rich-tasks}{Project GitHub Repository}.